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Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re doing pure product, the customer is supposed to run the product and build an organization around the product. In this case, you are building that organization and you’re doing the business process on behalf of the customer.

Anil Kaul: That is correct. The only thing I would add to that is that the product piece here is something that we are building ourselves as well.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, which is true for a lot of the Do It For Me (DIFM) SaaS-enabled BPO companies. If you look at Athenahealth, for example, they are one of the most successful healthcare IT public companies. They focus on addressing the collections issue that physicians face – interfacing with insurance companies, filing the right codes, and so forth. For a small physician’s office, it’s a nightmare to do collections. They build proprietary software and a lot of artificial intelligence and they outsource the whole collection process on behalf of the physician’s offices. >>>

Character of a Business v. a Design Entrepreneur

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Entrepreneurs are the people who reinvent and revigorate our society in large and small ways and we know them by their actions. However, how do entrepreneurs with a business or a design background differ from one another and what are their personal traits? >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You have good defensible IP.

Varun Singh: Very good defensible IP. That started a few conversation with other VCs. I started a conversation with BV Jagdish from NetScaler. I was one of BV’s largest customers in India. I knew him through Net Magic because he was on the Board. He introduced me to Justin who is our CEO right now. At that point in time, I had hired Justin as the COO. He did about six months of consulting with us before that. Before that, he was the VP Sales at Juniper.

Sramana Mitra: He hadn’t been a CEO before? >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You had that experience as well. Both of you were security industry insiders and had lots of insight into what’s happening. The reason why I’m asking for this background is that security is probably the segment of the startup industry that has the maximum entrepreneurial activity. It’s crowded. There’s constant startup activity going on. Unless you have a really good handle on the ecosystem, it’s very difficult to do security companies.

Aki Eldar: I absolutely agree with you. This is also one of the reasons why it was really hard at the beginning. Do you know a bit about Data Leakage Prevention?

Sramana Mitra: A little bit, yes.

Aki Eldar: It’s also dealing with data protection but in a totally different way. It’s not protecting the data itself. It’s protecting the infrastructure against data loss and data leakage. This space was really crowded when we started Secure Islands. Only security experts understood our vision. One of them was Shlomo Kramer, who I assume you know. >>>

Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: All your core customers today are based on your Mckinsey network essentially.

Anil Kaul: Not anymore.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s how it got developed.

Anil Kaul: In the beginning.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the business dynamics. Typically, outsourcing companies have a certain model. There’s a certain profitability structure. They are not as profitable as a product company would be just because products get built once and sold many times. Even though it takes more investment to build a product company, once it starts to scale, it provides a better profitability structure. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You guys have already done six months prototype building with seven engineers?

Varun Singh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Nexus gave you money before that process started?

Varun Singh: Nexus gave us our seed round.

Sramana Mitra: How much?

Varun Singh: $750,000.

Sramana Mitra: How long did that take you? >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 2)

Aki Eldar: I and my brother founded Secure Islands. We did that because we figured out that there is a huge problem in the security industry. The problem was that people are talking about securing data, but they’re not actually doing it. They are securing the infrastructure, the exits, and the devices. But they are not securing the data itself. We thought that something needs to change here because it’s an endless game trying to fight against different threats and bad guys. It would be like a dog chasing its own tail. It will continue forever, but it will never succeed.

Instead of trying to defend threats, why not protect what is really important, which is the data itself. We are talking about unstructured data because this is the biggest problem. The reason that it is the biggest problem is as soon as a file or email is created, it’s already exposed internally and externally to thousands of different thread vectors. At the same time, organizations are no longer located in one place. They are located in a lot of places. Their data is spread all over – internally, externally, cloud, and mobile. This is a distributed environment. It is impossible to protect data by protecting the perimeter because the perimeter is not there anymore. We are talking about borderless enterprises. >>>

Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Give me some examples of a typical client situation.

Anil Kaul: For example, our client wanted to optimize their advertising spend. This was a company here in the Bay Area. It’s an online company and they had been doing a lot of spending. At some point in time, they decided to run a TV campaign. The TV campaign was very successful, but they were not able to figure out what part of sales was being driven by TV versus what they had been doing online. We helped them understand that as well as optimize their spend.

They have a marketing budget of about $250 million. One of the big issues there was they thought that TV is not as successful as we showed it to be. They cut their budget on TV spending. What we were able to show them was that over half of their search traffic was coming because of their TV advertising campaign. They continued supporting their TV spend, which they wouldn’t have done otherwise. >>>